Vespers ["Once, I believed in you"]

Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree.
Here, in Vermont, country
of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived,
it would mean you existed.

By this logic, you do not exist. Or you exist
exclusively in warmer climates,
in fervent Sicily and Mexico and California,
where are grown the unimaginable
apricot and fragile peach. Perhaps
they see your face in Sicily; here we barely see
the hem of your garment. I have to discipline myself
to share with John and Noah the tomato crop.

If there is justice in some other world, those
like myself, whom nature forces
into lives of abstinence, should get
the lion's share of all things, all
objects of hunger, greed being
praise of you. And no one praises
more intensely than I, with more
painfully checked desire, or more deserves
to sit at your right hand, if it exists, partaking
of the perishable, the immortal fig,
which does not travel.

--Louise Gluck (1943- ), American poet,  and teacher, US Poet Laureate 2003,  awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2020 announced today, the first American so honored since Toni Morrison in 1993. Poem from The Wild Iris, 1992.

Photo by Christine Grillo, From Last Word on Nothing blog, "Guest Post: The Death of a Fig Tree: My Climate Change" found here.